This Fungus EATS Radiation — And Scientists Want to Send It to Mars

In the deadliest place on Earth, where radiation can kill you in minutes, scientists found something growing on the walls — and it wasn’t dying… it was thriving.

Listen to “This Fungus EATS Radiation — And Scientists Want to Send It to Mars” on Spreaker.

There are places on this planet where life simply isn’t supposed to exist. Places so hostile, so fundamentally incompatible with biology, that even bacteria struggle to survive. And yet, as we’ve learned time and again, life has a peculiar habit of showing up precisely where we least expect it — and doing things that make scientists scratch their heads and question everything they thought they knew.

Alright, let’s set the scene here, because context matters. On April 26, 1986, a routine safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor Four went catastrophically wrong. Now, “catastrophically wrong” might be the understatement of the century — the resulting explosions sent a fireball of radioactive material into the atmosphere and created what remains the worst nuclear disaster in human history. The Soviet authorities eventually established a 19-mile exclusion zone around the site, a dead zone covering 1,600 square miles where radiation levels were so high that simply existing there was a death sentence.

And for a while, that’s exactly what it looked like — a dead zone. No humans. No animals. Just silence and the slow decay of an abandoned city.

But then something weird started happening.

Fast forward to 1991 — just five years after the disaster — and a team of Ukrainian scientists led by microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova did something most people would consider certifiably insane: they went inside the destroyed reactor. Not for long, mind you. As researcher Tatiana Tugai later explained, it was only possible to be near the reactor for very short periods of time. They grabbed samples as quickly as possible and got out.

What they found on those walls should not have been there. The interior of Reactor Four — one of the most radioactive places on Earth — was turning black. Not from ash or decay, but from something alive. Something growing.

Sure, some mold survived the radiation. Mildly interesting, right? Except the story doesn’t end there. Over dozens of visits throughout the 1990s, Zhdanova’s team documented an astonishing 37 different species of fungi living in and around the reactor. And these weren’t just survivors clinging to existence in a harsh environment. These fungi were rich in melanin — the same pigment that gives color to human skin and hair — and they seemed to be genuinely thriving.

So what’s so special about melanin? Well, in humans, melanin protects our skin from ultraviolet radiation. It’s why people living closer to the equator developed darker skin over generations — more melanin, more protection from the sun. But for these fungi, melanin appeared to be doing something far more extraordinary than just shielding them from radiation.

It seemed to be helping them eat it.

Eat radiation? Come on. I get the skepticism. This sounds like the opening act of a B-movie horror film. But let’s look at what the science actually shows.

Radiopharmacologist Ekaterina Dadachova and immunologist Arturo Casadevall at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine decided to investigate these bizarre organisms in proper laboratory conditions. In 2007, they exposed melanized fungi — including strains similar to those found at Chernobyl — to radioactive cesium. What they discovered was genuinely strange: the irradiated fungi grew about ten percent faster than identical samples not exposed to radiation.

That alone would be remarkable. But Dadachova’s team went further. They found that within just 20 to 40 minutes of radiation exposure, the fungi rapidly altered the chemical properties of their melanin. The melanin became more efficient at transferring electrons — essentially becoming “charged up” by the radiation.

Dadachova proposed a term for what these fungi might be doing: radiosynthesis. The idea is that melanin could be acting like chlorophyll in plants — but instead of capturing energy from sunlight, it’s harvesting energy from ionizing radiation.

Now, before we get too excited, let me pump the brakes a little. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we’re not quite there yet. As of today, scientists haven’t been able to demonstrate definitive carbon fixation dependent on ionizing radiation, or a clear metabolic pathway showing exactly how this energy conversion works. Engineer Nils Averesch of Stanford University has been blunt about this, noting that “actual radiosynthesis remains to be shown.”

So what we’re looking at is a well-supported but still incomplete hypothesis. The fungi definitely grow better when exposed to radiation. The melanin definitely changes in measurable ways. But the complete biochemical story? That’s still being written.

Still, what we do know is fascinating enough. Dr. Joshua Nosanchuk at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine summed it up nicely: fungi have been through numerous challenging environmental “boot camps” since time began, and they’ve developed some truly remarkable survival abilities along the way. “Eating” radiation, he suggests, is just one such adaptation that certain melanin-producing fungi developed. This fungal process of energy conversion is similar to photosynthesis — just with a very different power source.

The practical applications of all this are worth considering.

Science fiction movies about astronauts traveling to Mars often show them grappling with the problem of cosmic radiation. It’s not dramatic — there are no explosions or monster attacks — but it’s one of the biggest genuine challenges facing human space exploration. Beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field, astronauts are bombarded by galactic cosmic radiation — high-speed charged particles from exploding stars that increase the risk of radiation sickness and cancer.

Traditional shielding solutions involve heavy metals, which are expensive and difficult to launch into space. Every extra pound you send up costs thousands of dollars.

So naturally, some clever researchers looked at these radiation-loving fungi and thought, “What if we could use these as living shields?”

In 2022, scientists sent samples of Cladosporium sphaerospermum — the same species dominating Chernobyl’s radioactive environment — to the International Space Station. The experiment ran for about 30 days, monitoring the fungus’s growth and its ability to block cosmic radiation. The results were promising: the fungus grew about 21 percent faster in space than the ground control samples, and a thin layer — just 1.7 millimeters thick — reduced radiation by roughly two percent compared to the control.

Two percent might not sound like much. The advantage, though, is that these fungi are self-replicating. They can grow, repair themselves, and potentially be cultivated on-site using local resources. NASA astrobiologist Lynn J. Rothschild has proposed something called “myco-architecture” — essentially, growing fungal walls on the Moon or Mars that would serve as both structural elements and self-regenerating radiation shields.

Imagine building a lunar base where the walls literally grow themselves and protect you from cosmic rays at the same time. That’s not science fiction anymore. That’s an actual research direction being actively pursued.

Back on Earth, researchers are also exploring whether these fungi could help clean up radioactive contamination. Some species, like Aspergillus niger and Paecilomyces javanicus, can transform highly mobile uranium into stable, insoluble minerals — essentially locking dangerous radioactive material in place and preventing it from spreading through groundwater or being absorbed by plants.

The potential applications for nuclear disaster sites like Fukushima are obvious. Instead of dangerous, expensive human-led cleanup operations, you might someday be able to deploy fungal colonies that actively seek out and neutralize radioactive contamination. It sounds like a monster movie pitch — “The Fungus That Ate Fukushima” — but it’s grounded in real science.

Coming soon to nuclear disaster site near you!

Of course, we’re still in the early stages of understanding these organisms. Not all melanized fungi exhibit this radiation-loving behavior. Cladosporium cladosporioides, for instance, increases melanin production when exposed to radiation but doesn’t actually grow faster. The behavior we see in Chernobyl’s dominant species appears to be something special, not universal to all dark-pigmented fungi.

And the complete mechanism remains elusive. Is radiosynthesis truly analogous to photosynthesis, with a step-by-step energy conversion pathway? Or is it more of a stress response that just happens to enhance survival? Scientists are still working that out.

What we do know for certain is this: deep inside one of the deadliest places on Earth, in an environment that can kill a human in minutes, these humble black fungi are not just surviving. They’re flourishing. They’re growing toward radiation sources like plants grow toward sunlight. They’re doing something with that deadly energy that allows them to thrive where nothing else can.

Jeff Goldblum was right and always has been… “life finds a way.” Life adapts. It always has. And sometimes it adapts in ways that completely upend our understanding of what’s possible.

Nearly four decades after the Chernobyl disaster, the fungus is still there, still growing, still doing whatever mysterious thing it does with all that radiation. And if everything goes according to plan, its descendants might someday be protecting astronauts on Mars — biological shields grown from the offspring of organisms that learned to feast on one of the most destructive forces known to humanity.

Not bad for a little black mold. I still think we should make that Fungus Monster Movie though.

REFERENCES:

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.